LIVE! Dream Cohort: A Dance of Sun & Moon
Beginner-Intermediate practice group
You can sign up at patreon.com/deathclown
Dream Cohort: A Dance of Sun & Moon
Focusing on Dao of Dream/Night praxis and theory as taught by Liu Ming (R.I.P.), with additional creativity/improvisation/somatic/biomechanic methods.
This is a monthly subscription created as a "level 2" to my thenightgarden.substack.com premium membership.
I have prepped the first zoom teachings to be on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Wednesdays 10am-1130am PST. I don’t plan on doing every Wednesday morning, but because this is the beginning, the ball will start softly rolling.
First Wednesday mornings are set aside for the 3-hour Night Gardeners monthly calendrical session.
Once there are enough people who have begun doing the practice, we will then begin scheduling facilitated dream sharing sessions at times when people can RSVP, as those sessions cannot be recorded or have much value when not present in the field of them.
The scheduling can change, but I’ve found that these times (mid-week in between snake and horse shichen/hours) generally has very good available yang qi. If we meet more regularly, but for shorter times, I think we can alleviate some feelings of scarcity and struggle that are often inherent in western “coursework”. Things will stay flexible as this is the yin wood snake year.
There are two publicly available orientation posts already on the patreon.
What this is & isn't
In this patreon membership, each month I will host various sessions that will be recorded live and uploaded for distance learning. Sessions will be hosted on zoom and can be attended live.
This is a one-to-many style of learning based in storykeeping, indigenous oral-centered relating, and decolonial group process.
One type of session is going over the theory (View/Story) and practical instructions (Methods/States & Actions), month by month, and answering Q&A. This continually ongoing introduction-and-review is the "transmission" or "initiation" as they say, into your own already always dreaming nature, that will repeatedly align itself with the View as various internalized and normalized preferences are witnessed and seen for what they are. (This is a neuro-decolonization process.)
A second kind of session, dependent on member scheduling, will be a "dream sangha" where I will facilitate the sharing of and interaction with our dreams using the appropriate view & methods outlined by Ming. We can also practice some basic nonconceptual meditation here together as a way "back" in.
A third type of activity in this membership will be coordinated dreaming dates (probably quarterly) in which everyone in the membership will be asked to experience and record what happens when we all have certain intentions/sleep hygiene on certain nights, and dreams from these nights will be shared in dream sangha sessions.
Additional material & sessions will focus on creativity, artmaking, improvisational methods, hygiene, nutrition, somatics/biomechanics and supplementary support for dream praxis as it is required by members. I plan on using this to experiment with various curriculums, pre-recorded and live material. For example, going through 4 different translations of the Dao De Jing, section by section, as an aid to all other practices. If members show good maturity and capacity, there may also be deathclown practices that are highly embodied and must take place in real-time. There will be plenty of adjunctive material in the patreon archive added over time.
Notes:
This patreon membership does not explicitly include any of the foundational calendrical information (monthly video lectures) that is supplied in my substack premium membership. I consider this substack to be the ground floor as it relates to testing how a person can align with the View/Story presented here and if they can go further. While I am not declaring that a person must be in both cohorts, it’s clear to me the functional overlap of the content.This patreon membership is primarily focused on the practice of dream "yoga" from a Daoist position (which is not about learning lucid dreaming as is taught in many other dream courses).
A practice of zuowang (nonconceptual meditation) is recommended and will be integrated into the curriculum in a soft, flexible way.
Please email or leave comments as it pertains to questions, etc.